Page 41 of Rumpelstilzchen

“Did what not what work, my He—” Rumple cut himself off.

A flush rose under the cinnamon freckles that dusted Boy’s cheeks, and Rumple’s shadows chased it as it spread across his face. Beautiful.

“I thought…” he began. “I mean, I’d wondered why you worked for the Queen. You’re the legendary shadow geist of Falchovari, and I didn’t think it would be for money or prestige. But then…” Boy closed his eyes and leaned into the shadows that caressed him so tenderly. “Then I saw how she compelled you, felt the pain she caused you, and I remembered.”

Rumple pressed his heavy shadows closer still. “What did you remember?”

“Your name.” Boy said it so simply, so plainly, that for a moment Rumple wondered if he’d heard him correctly. “I figured that she, too, must have learned your true name and then used it against you.”

Rumple couldn’t speak. Had he been in human form, he wouldn’t have been able to draw a breath. His shadows paused their gentle ministrations along Boy’s jaw and through his honeyed hair, and a pair of rich brown eyes opened to search the darkness in earnest.

“I wasn’t sure it was you. Not at first.” Boy curled his fingers around the shadows that still held his hand and squeezed. “But then, last night…” His voice broke off on a hiccup, and Rumple’s shadows condensed further. Boy’s pain had become his own.

Rumple sealed his Heart safely within his shadow’s embrace and rubbed them up and down the length of his notched spine. The swaddling had worked to soothe his human once before, and when Boy’s ragged breathing evened out, he knew it had done so again. Even without physical form, Rumple found himself smiling into the top of Boy’s head.

“But last night,” he spoke in an intimate whisper. “When I saw what she did, when you couldn’t stop her from summoning you and when you said she’d taken your name… that’s when I knew for certain.”

Boy straightened his back and raised his head, as if he could see Rumple’s human face in front of him and he wanted to speak directly. “The Queen is the most powerful person in Falchovari, and if she were going to enthral anyone, it makes sense that it would be the most powerful shadow geist, doesn’t it?”

A low rumble of pride vibrated the air between them. How clever his human was.

“When I was little, Grandma used to tell your stories as a warning for us to behave.” The corner of Boy’s mouth curved upward in a smile. “I was always so scared my siblings’ antics might draw you to our mill that I would leave the curtains open at night to let the moon shine through the window onto my bed.”

Boy’s fingers flexed and relaxed rhythmically against the tight hold of the shadows, as if they were a blanket and he were a kitten, but Rumple’s focus was caught on how Boy had lost his shy stammer—finally, he was at ease in his presence.

“You weren’t the only geist I feared,” he continued. Rumple made a sound of low surprise that came out more like a chuckle. Boy smiled and continued on, Rumple content simply to be in his presence. “On my eighth summer, one of the farmer’s daughters three homesteads west of ours was snatched by a korndaemon because her family didn’t thresh the harvest in a ceremony.”

Boy’s sunny disposition fell. “Grandma had warned it would happen… that when people no longer held to the old ways, they gave power to the geists that would harm us.” He shuffled in Rumple’s shadowed arms.

“That’s why she told me your true name, because she believed there was power in knowledge.” His wide brown eyes filled with tears, and Rumple reached out to wipe them away. That same soft sizzling sound came upon their contact with his shadows, and Rumple felt himself grow stronger.

Boy took a long and deep inhale through parted lips. “But it’s also why I was forbidden from seeing her again. My father feared it, that power in knowledge. Grandma died the next summer, and he took away our names to keep us safe. If a geist couldn’t know it, they couldn’t use it to lure us away from him, like they did the other children in the area, and leave him without help for the mill.”

He sank his teeth into his bottom lip as uncertainty crept back in, and lowered his voice when he asked, “That is what happened to you, isn’t it? The Queen used that knowledge to gain power over you.”

Rumple hummed in the affirmative. How many years had he searched for someone, anyone, who would know his true name? How long had he wished for an end to Queen Schön’s hold over him? He’d wasted time salvaging scrolls and trinkets, when he should have been searching for his Heart. The same Heart now encased within the safety of his hold. He couldn’t believe his fortune.

Boy nodded against Rumple’s slowly solidifying form, his forehead brushing over the shadowed and leathery skin of his chest, before he spoke. “I sat on the stool by the spinning wheel after you were summoned and watched your magick turn the straw to gold.”

When he raised his head, damp lashes framed Boy’s thoughtful gaze, and Rumple lost himself in their chestnut depths. “You were in such pain when she summoned you, and yet you kept your promise. While your magick spun the straw, your shadows comforted me.” Boy pressed his palms flat against Rumple’s half-formed torso, then felt his way in the dark up his sternum, across to his shoulders, and down his arms where he pulled them tight around his slender frame. “Like this.”

Rumple indulged in the intimacy—feasted on it, even. With each word, with each moment spent in Boy’s proximity, he felt his tether to the human realm grow stronger.

“And that’s when I knew,” continued Boy. “All these years, I’d never understood why father feared like he did, why he let it rule him. But he was right; there’s power in knowledge.”

He placed a gentle kiss between Rumple’s pecs, and a shiver rolled through him.

“By the time the Queen came at daybreak, I knew what I needed to do.” Boy brought his hands to rest back over the hollow of Rumple’s chest. “She barely glanced at me at all. She held a parchment in one hand and a quill in the other. When she asked for my name…”

Boy took a shaky breath, closed his eyes, and exhaled slowly. “I gave her yours.”

There, on the damp and cold floor of the palace prison cell, time ground to a halt.

How had Queen Schön not struck Boy dead on the spot? Then Rumple remembered that Boy still wore the shadow-infused collar and all his thoughts aligned with perfect clarity. She would have tried, and when she couldn’t, she would have had her guardsmen drag him here. While she waited, she searched all her grimoires for a way to reverse what Boy had done, which had been the chaos in her private rooms.

Boy’s eyes opened and their gazes locked. What Rumple saw there was akin to standing on the overhang of a sheer cliff. He knew now, beyond doubt, that he had approached everything wrong. The search for his Heart had never been about prolonging his time in the human realm, nor about possessing a magickal artefact that would make him stronger. Where Rumple had wanted to claim, he should have nourished.

The longer he looked into the abyss that stretched out before him, the more certain he became that he would willingly plummet to the very bottom before he allowed any harm to befall his precious human. Boy had come into his life when Rumple had needed him most, but Rumple’s pride and ignorance had almost let him slip through his fingers. Instinctively, he tightened his hold.